This is a blog that I started in october 2010, mainly for discussing my ideas on the economy, taxation and politics. Please add comments - I'll do my best to reply. If you are new, I would recommend watching one of my YouTube presentations (in French or English). You can download a fully indexed pdf version (over 600 pages) here.

It's a pretty complicated set of data, but I have extracted the main numbers in the following table which provides information for 39 countries. 12 of them are in the Eurozone countries, but BIS also provides a figure for the entire Eurozone - only 7% of the debt is held by the other 7 countries. The table also includes another 27 other countries, and I have converted all,the debt values into dollars using the exchange rate for 2014 from the World Bank.

You can see that Private Sector Debt is highest in the US, where debt had reached $25.5 trillion, followed by China with $19.8 trillion, and Japan with $7.9 trillion. Then comes a series of European countries - France with $4.8 trillion, the UK with $4.7 trillion, Germany with roughly $4.0 trillion and so forth. I was surprised to see that even countries like Canada and Australia have private sector debt levels of €3.5 trillion and $2.8 trillion respectively. That's huge, given their relatively small populations.

Let's assume that the Banks that created all that debt are charging interest at around 5% interest per annum - a round number which is probably not that far off the mark. After all, remember that Credit Card companies will happily charge you 15-20%. That would mean that around $5 trillion in interest charges are being sucked out of people's pockets every year. Not far off $1000 for every person on the planet. Given that many of them don't earn anything like that much, you can begin to see the scale of the racket.

Would anyone care to explain to me why this system, in which Commercial Banks have been given the right to create debt by lending money they don't have and then charging everyone - citizens, businesses and governments interest, is a good idea?

It is certainly a good idea for the 1% at the top of the system who rake all this money in. It is an unmitigated disaster for the other 99% of us.

Our governments should be creating our money supply debt free and allow us to get the parasites off our backs, because the current system is clearly a total disaster.